Director: Chu Tianshu
Writer: Chu Tianshu
Cast: Zhou Yu Tong
Running time: 20mins
Every fiction film has to navigate a delicate balancing act, when it comes to the suspension of the audience’s disbelief. A big part of that is judging what works well as a choreographed routine, and what does not. In that regard, putting standup comedy in a narrative film is high risk, and low-reward at the best of times.
As is also the case with sports (and in particular football), the more you show of what is supposed to be an organic event, the less spontaneous and enjoyable it feels. While it is true that very few stand-up sets are actually off-the-cuff – often what we see on stage and television is the result of months of testing on smaller audiences – there is always a real energy involved, borne of the risk of any live event. Someone might forget their joke; the punchline might not land; someone in the crowd might start heckling. And with that risk, comes a level of buy-in for when things go well – when sometimes we laugh just as much out of relief for the lonely artist on stage, as we do at the unexpected satirical barb or double-entendre that they just hit us with.
In a scripted piece of entertainment, however, that buy-in isn’t there. If the jokes are tame, the audience will do as they are told and cackle along – and if they don’t, then the editor can always pipe in some canned laughter to enhance the triumphant moment. And much more often than not, the jokes, which usually link to something we’ve seen in the plot, don’t work as jokes – so we find ourselves alienated from the experience everyone else is apparently enjoying. Every time the crowd murmurs in anticipation, or roars with laughter, we feel more overtly than any other time that we are being led down the path, spoon-fed a conclusion which we otherwise probably wouldn’t have reached.
Sometimes, this can still be funny in spite of itself. The B-movie icon of Rudy Ray Moore famously incorporated his stand-up into his films – and while the jokes usually lacked the structure or logical twists you would need to laugh at them, his rigid, barking delivery made them legitimately enjoyable moments. But when that isn’t the case, you end up in the realm of my least favourite childhood television series, Custer’s Last Stand-up – a show about a terminally unfunny child comedian whose sets on nagging mothers and playground bullies never failed to leave the on-screen audience in stitches, and me reaching for the remote.
The scripted stand-up session in The Show Must Move On is very much in that second camp, unfortunately. It is fair to say that some of the joviality in Chu Tianshu’s writing may be lost in translation, after all, she is writing in Mandarin, and in a set of social circumstances unique to my own – so for all I know, the set may be utterly hilarious to audiences in China. But from where I was sitting, the material main character Mao-Mao (Zhou Yu Tong) is not something that justifies cutaway shots of her audience going to pieces in their seats.
While on stage, Zhou Yu Tong does not seem to offer us up many surprises, with ‘punchlines’ often serving up the most blunt and obvious conclusion to a sentence. “Don’t let a man cum inside you” for example – which sees one woman spit out her drink laughing. But the line is delivered with none of the Dolemite-style gusto needed to make it work – it is mumbled meekly like the first half of the sentence, capping off a relatively timid statement about the importance of safe sex. As the routine progresses, Mao-Mao struggles to build momentum beyond this – but somehow carrying the audience with her; leaving real viewers wondering if we missed something.
She is not helped by the film’s pacing. Chu Tianshu has decided against linear editing here, and instead divided the story into several distinct ‘chapters’, complete with large pink text to let us know where each (admittedly beautifully shot) sequence begins. In between them, Mao-Mao continues her routine – apparently using the lessons she learned from some distinctly dark chapters of her life to inform her comedy. But some of the chapters are very short, others long, meaning the story and the stand-up feel very stop-start; both depriving the comedy of time to build up, and preventing some of the more serious moments in the narrative time to sink in. And through it all, the performance doesn’t get any darker or more cynical with the increasingly awful things she experiences. It just plateaus in a twee, light-hearted limbo.
This is in the wake of Mao-Mao finding out her boyfriend has cheated on her with her best friend. This is after, on the rebound, she has ended up in bed with a man who insists he doesn’t need to use a condom because he will “pull out” (no prizes for guessing what actually happens) – leaving her feeling violated, and questioning whether she actually consented. This is after her sobbing, idiot boyfriend – having begged her to take him back – attempts to save face by blaming Mao-Mao for the collapse of their relationship.
The decision to begin the film with the climactic performance might be one of the biggest problems here. If Mao-Mao is just asserted as being innately good at stand-up, the manufacturing of laughter becomes even more overt. What might have been better, is if she began the film on stage, trying to hit the audience with things she thinks the audience will find funny, but which lack authenticity, and then dying on her arse. Then, after the painful life-lessons of the film, she might find her voice during a final confrontation with her idiot ex-boyfriend – and tap into that on stage to elicit laughter in the film’s final shots.
The jokes might still not work for me, but the triumph would at least feel more like the end of an arc – hard earned and well deserved. At the same time, it would go some way to correcting the most egregious failure of this story – it would give Mao-Mao a way to fight back, and to righteously spite the morons she is plagued by in her dating life. Not just days later, when they are happily going about their new lives, but in their face, in the moment, in a way that will torment them for years to come. As it is, it seems instead as though the director is suggesting Mao-Mao should take all the wrongs in her life in stride, because at least she can make a career out of it. But why not both?
One of the things I will give The Show Must Move On credit for, is that its heart is clearly in the right place. It does not punch down, and in a country which is increasingly placing greater emphasis on the apparent glories of patriarchal norms, takes firm aim at the imbecilic behaviour of many men actually borne out in reality. It might well be the case that Chu Tianshu has used the writing and direction of this story as a way of exorcising some particularly idiotic demons from her own past – and more power to her for that. But the core framing device of the film – using a stand-up routine to pace its chapters – is built on a routine that isn’t that funny, and is often at loggerheads with its most important plot-beats.
